You know, when I was a kid I really just wanted to be independent and do everything on my own. Eat icecream when I wanted to, go to bed whenever I felt like it (no naps!) and watch as many movies as my heart desired. And now, as much as it hurts to say; I was wrong.
As most of us who are reading this know; being an adult sucks, and that statement alone is by no means revolutionary, except to every person when they first had to file forms, pay thousands of dollars for school or bite their tongue when a sibling took a jibe at us.
I'm 20-years-old and I still can't resist the bait when my little sister starts trying to bicker with me and then everybody reminds you that you're an adult and can't do that anymore. You just sit there dumbfounded and trying to figure out when the heck that happened and realize you now live in a world where most everyone expects you to know what you're doing.
Genuinely, from one 20-year-old to all the other adults reading this, I have no idea what I'm doing. The outside world that I'm in is frightening and the worst part is is that we've got that stupid "I want to be independent and figure things out on my own" thing going on with our biology.
Honestly, we just want to be told what to do in order to make life down the road be ok, and maybe even more than ok. We've been trained since kindergarten to sit down and take directions and, if we have a problem, to express what we need by raising our hands politely and asking out loud, and now we're all just booted out into the world to sink or to swim, and we need help.
To clarify, we don't want you to tell us what political party to vote for or what march to join or what God we need to find, those are sincerely independent choices that we want and need to make on our own. The things we really need help with is finding a spouse that is right for us, learning what really makes a marriage, when's the right time to buy a house, how to exceed in any field we go into, or even just how to make sustained and positive relationships as adults.
Going about it systematically would be helpful too. Sometimes I wonder in universities full of CAP courses, why in the world is there not a life course yet? Specialty life courses would be helpful too, by the way, like "Life Logistics: Taxes and Other Forms". Not that we can't advocate for that on our own, but on the off chance a professor or administrator is reading this, please know that we'd really appreciate life courses.
So please, you asked us to always tell you what we need, and this is me, politely raising my hand to express that we need your help in figuring out how to do life. We're kindly waiting for your answer.
